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What Barack Obama’s climate-change strategy means for Canada: Walkom

The U.S. may not be doing much to battle climate change. But the fact that it is doing anything puts pressure on Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

Both the U.S. and Canada have promised that their carbon emissions in 2020 will be 17 per cent below 2005 levels. But thanks to President Barack Obama, the U.S. is on track to meeting its goal. Canada, according to the Harper government’s own figures, is not, writes Thomas Walkom.
(Sean Kilpatrick / THE CANADIAN PRESS file photo)

But Canadians also have a broader interest in how America handles climate change. For the sad truth is that no Canadian government of any political stripe will do much on this front unless the U.S. acts.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative government has made it clear that it won’t introduce any taxes or regulations that might put Canadian industry at a competitive disadvantage.

Jean Chrétien’s Liberals didn’t use this language when they were in power. But their remarkable inactivity on climate change also reflected an unwillingness to act more boldly than Canada’s main trading partner.

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Should Tom Mulcair’s New Democrats ever take office, they, too, would be faced with the same constraint: to move farther or faster than America on climate change puts Canadian jobs — and corporate profits — at risk.

So how fast is America moving? And what exactly is Obama proposing?

The answer to the first question is that the Obama is doing more to fight climate change than many, perhaps including the president himself, ever expected.

He has been helped by a devastating economic recession that reduced the demand for coal-fired electricity.

He has also been helped by the exploitation of relatively inexpensive shale oil and gas, which has reduced the need for dirtier coal. (Problem: shale gas production threatens groundwater supplies.)

However, the Obama administration also did its bit.

It required new coal-fired generators to reduce the amount of carbon put into the atmosphere. It demanded stricter controls on auto exhaust emissions.

Both the U.S. and Canada have promised that their carbon emissions in 2020 will be 17 per cent below 2005 levels. But thanks to Obama, the U.S. is on track to meeting its goal.

Canada, according to the Harper government’s own figures, is not.

Obama’s speech in Washington Tuesday suggests more of the same. He’s not going to try for a carbon tax, like that levied by British Columbia, 10 American states, the European Union and Australia.

That’s because he has no hope of getting such a tax, or any kind of carbon pricing, past Republicans in Congress.

Instead, he’ll push ahead with federal diktats issued under the authority of existing environmental protection laws. One study done by the Resources for the Future, a non-partisan research organization, calculates that this strategy has reduced emissions faster than the kind of carbon taxes Obama initially supported.

Let’s be clear. None of what Obama is proposing will solve the global climate-change problem. The targets that the U.S. and Canada have set themselves are embarrassingly inadequate. Some countries, including China, have no targets at all.

But clamping down further on coal-fired electrical generating will have a discernable effect, particularly for those Ontarians who must suffer the smog that wafts across the Great Lakes each summer from the U.S.

As York University professor Mark Winfield points out, the fact that America is doing anything at all to battle climate change will also highlight the Harper’s government’s failings on this file.

Does that matter politically? Harper clearly doesn’t think so, which is why he and his ministers are so dismissive of environmental critics.

But Canadians pay attention to what goes on in the U.S. If the Americans tackle global warming while we do not, voters might just ask: How come?

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